Barry Adamson’s output is enviable, if sporadic. He has a storied solo career, has played with two legendary bands—Magazine and Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds—and scored films along the lines of Lost Highway. The latter is especially apt, as Adamson is something like the aural equivalent of David Lynch. He has a reputation for giving no ground to his audience unless he deems it prudent, he prefers emotional and psychic landscapes to linear progressions, and also possesses an uncanny (or, some say, untalented) ear for the purple prose of pulp. As you could well guess with such a resume—and such an M.O.—Adamson regularly plies his trade in the darker districts of the brain.
The slinky descending bass riff, sparse snares, and spectral moan of woodwinds that open Adamson’s latest album, Back to the Cat, could very well have been lifted from an episode of Twin Peaks. But as the instruments layer one atop the other—first a few jagged stabs of electric guitar, then the punch of brass—the meaning of Cat comes clear. Adamson is not just a cat: he is a cool cat, a hep cat. He is the crooner on stage in the smoky lounge of the nightmare halfway between sleep and wakefulness. He inhales pain and exhales smoke. As the music builds to a crescendo, he belts out a portrait of hazy, black & white—or noir et blanche—streets that sounds like it was copped from the tortured subconscious of Sam Spade: “I woke up this morning from a crazy dream / the earth was a churning ball of fire.” He follows with a rapid-fire roll call of the sorts you could find slinking around here; tired, poor and huddled masses that Lady Liberty would sooner sink than send to shore.
This is the point where some listeners jump ship. The music is certainly a solid affair, but it shares a spotlight with Adamson’s voice, and some reviewers have found themselves cringing at what he chooses to say with it (for reference, see most reviews of Stranger on the Sofa). In all honesty, Adamson’s lyrics are no more ridiculous than any story Nick Cave has seen fit to tell. If you were to trade Tender Prey’s bourbon for a martini it would not look out of place rubbing elbows with Back to the Cat. Murderous ballads and big band bruisers aren’t the only tricks up Adamson’s sleeves, though. “Straight ’til Sunrise” pits a beautiful melody against an ugly story, playing on the jangling dissonance of emotions that occurs when Bacharach meets assault and battery. It is a rare thing for a song to squirm and swing on the same beat.
What will either make this album sweepingly magnificent or cloyingly corny is the way that it takes Adamson’s “soundtrack without a film” concept to its logical extreme. The individual songs carry a storyline, albeit an appropriately fractured one, for the length of the album. To call it a concept album would be mostly inaccurate, but when is that term applied correctly these days? Still, it is more of a surreal, Grand Guignol musical sans stage production than a pure-bred concept album. A bit paradoxically, Back to the Cat is almost a conventional album, as well, something that long seemed impossible to expect from Barry Adamson. There are only ten tracks, and only one of those overruns five minutes, which is how Back to the Cat manages to surpass those that came before. In this album Adamson has reined in his sprawling vision while still keeping his palate a lively mix of big city sins and deep, dark human viscera. Working with such material, it is easy to make missteps—the devil-narrated gospel of “Civilization” wears its irony like an albatross—but they are largely forgivable when kept in the context of such a cohesive whole.
Call it what you will—doom lounge, noir swing, death jazz—an irritating obstacle still insists on presenting itself: No one can make a “great album” in this genre. Musically, lyrically, and conceptually Back to the Cat can be—and, despite its flaws, often is—great. But the current musical landscape will have no truck with innovators that don’t take themselves seriously enough. To grab the tale of this ouroboros, take David Lynch as an example yet again. He creates films that are dark, frightening, and often silly. Whether it is the self-conscious noir overtones of Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, or the left field musical interludes of Wild at Heart and INLAND EMPIRE, Lynch never lets the audience off without a slight grin. As a result he has a trenchant group of admirers, but also the cracked ribcage of a man routinely stomped by popular critics. So too with the cockeyed genius of Barry Adamson: A few may call him great, but they will be unfortunately outnumbered by those who call him weird.
Barry Adamson’s Back to the Cat is available via Amazon.
